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The Roots of Contemporary Nihilism and Its Political Consequences According to Nietzsche

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Thomas L. Pangle
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Extract

This essay is meant to help prepare a confrontation with the philosopher who is the most penetrating and thoroughgoing opponent of liberal democratic civilization. Nietzsche characterizes the modern democratic spirit, in all its forms, as “decadence.” This decadence he understands, however, as the final, catastrophic emergence into broad daylight of a previously hidden historical process which has been unfolding in all Western history: the “nihilism” of Athens and Jerusalem, of scientific rationalism and Judeo-Christian monotheism. Nietzsche understands himself as the thinker through whom this process finally attains self-consciousness. Now by Nietzsche's own testimony, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the published writing in which his mature philosophy finds its fullest expression. Yet Zarathustra, because it comprises the “Yes-saying part” of Nietzsche's project, because in it “the eye is spoiled by the tremendous need for seeing far,” possesses a “remoteness” that makes it the most difficult to approach of all his finished works (cf. EH, p. 1141). It seems to presuppose, rather than supply, an account of how Nietzsche understands the cultural crisis to which Zarathustra is responding. My purpose here is to attempt to gather from Nietzsche's diverse pronouncements a synoptic, consistent statement of his critique of the West.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 45 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1983

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References

1 Heidegger, Martin in his Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961)Google Scholar has taught us to add immediately that in the years subsequent to the completion of Part Four of Z, Nietzsche described himself as at work on a philosophic edifice for which Z was merely the “vestibule.” Only fragments — if elaborate and rich fragments — of this magnum opus were left behind; in what sense Nietzsche's philosophy remains, in his own estimation, decisively unfinished, can become clear only through a careful study of the Nachlass in the light of Z.

2 Reference is to Nietzsche's works by aphorism or section number wherever possible; where a page number is indicated, it refers to the Schlechta edition of the Werke (München: Carl Hanser, 1966)Google Scholar. I have made use of the Kaufmann translations, altered in minor ways to make them more strictly literal. Abbreviations used for titles of the major works are as follows: BT (Birth of Tragedy), UM (Untimely Meditations), HTH (Human, All Too Human), D (Dawn), GS (Gay Science), BGE (Beyond Good and Evil), GM (Genealogy of Morals), TI (Twilight of the Idols), EH (Ecce Homo), A (Antichrist), WP (Will to Power), Z (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

3 “All philosophers have in common the defect, that they proceed from contemporary man and through an analysis of him think they reach their goal. Involuntarily they conceive ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something permanent in every whirlpool, as a sure measure of things. Everything that the philosopher says about man is at bottom, however, nothing more than the testimony concerning the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of a historical sense is the hereditary defect of all philosophers … they will not learn that historical philosophizing is necessary from now on and with it the virtue of modesty” (HTH, p. 2; cf. GM, I: 2; II: 4; TI, “Reason in Philosophy,” p. 1).

4 In what follows I am indebted to Dannhauser, Werner J., Nietzsche's View of Socrates (Ithaca, 1974Google Scholar). Among other things, I accept, and will not here rehearse, his detailed refutation of Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche, 4th ed. (Princeton, 1974).Google Scholar

5 This is not to deny that Nietzsche finds strong stirrings of “Socratism” in pre-Socratic thought, and even in Sophocles: Dannhauser, Nietzsche's View of Socrates, p. 100; Morel, Georges, Nietzsche, 3 vols.: vol. 2, Analyse de la maladie (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971), 278–279.Google Scholar

6 Doubtless Nietzsche is somehow aware that this characterization does not begin to do justice to “Plato's secrecy and sphinx nature”: after all, Plato slept with a volume of Aristophanes at his side (BGE, p. 28). This “royal and magnificant hermit of the spirit” did not write “books for all the world” because he understood what Nietzsche calls “the difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, formerly known to philosophers — among the Indians as among the Greeks” (BGE, p. 30). “The hermit does not believe that any philosopher — assuming that a philosopher is always first of all a hermit — ever expressed his real and ultimate opinions in books” (BGE, p. 298). Despite these dazzling flashes of insight, Nietzsche does not approach Plato's texts with the hermeneutic caution that would seem to be implied: “Plato becomes a caricature in my hands” (WP, p. 374). The charm of such regal frankness cannot dispel our disappointment. Nietzsche does not seem concerned with the task — perhaps impossible — of understanding Plato as Plato understood himself, or even with the more manageable task of trying to understand Plato exactly as he intended himself to be understood. This can be partially, but only very partially, explained by noting that Nietzsche is interested in Plato's legacy, his historical influence, as much as in Plato's thought itself. That legacy, Nietzsche was sure, has been highly dogmatic and moralistic: “Even the most sublime ethical deeds, the stirrings of pity, self-sacrifice, heroism, and that so difficult to attain calm sea of the soul which the Apollinian Greek called sophrosune, were derived from the dialectic of knowledge by Socrates and his like-minded successors, down to the present, and accordingly designated as teachable” (BT, p. 15).

7 The ignoring of this cardinal feature of Nietzsche's analysis, and all that we shall see is implied, has led to some rather simplistic and distorted renditions of Nietzsche's view of Christianity. A recent striking example is Foot, Philippa, “Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values,” in Nietzsche, ed. Solomon, Robert C. (Garden City, 1973), pp. 156–168Google Scholar. The soundest discussion I have found is Valadier, Paul, Nietzsche et la critique du Christianisme (Paris, 1974), pp. 181ff.Google Scholar

8 HTH, p. 114; BGE, p. 49; GM, II: 23; A, pp. 16, 25; WP, pp. 135–37; Morel, Analyse de la maladie, pp. 126–32, obscures the significance of gratitude in Greek piety according to Nietzsche.

9 A, pp. 55–57; WP, pp. 142, 143, 145; Letter to Gast of 31 May 1888 (pp. 1296–97).

10 Cf. Pascal's remark: “Philosophers, they astonish ordinary men who are less educated; Christians, they astonish philosophers”: quoted in Löwith, Karl, “Man Between Infinities,” in Nature, History, and Existentialism (Evanston, Illinois, 1966), p. 115Google Scholar. In his campaign to rationalize Nietzsche, Kaufmann characteristically ignores Nietzsche's affinity with Pascal, going so far as to claim that Nietzsche's “whole conception of historical Christianity hinges on Luther”; as a consequence Kaufmann obscures the religious roots of “honesty” and modern philosophy — even though he quotes GS, p. 344 (Nietzsche, pp. 348–58).

11 Cf. Letter to Overbeck of 23 February 1887 (p. 1250): “These Greeks have much on their conscience — falsification was their true trade, the whole of European psychology is sick with Greek superficialities; and without the little bit of Jewishness etc. etc. etc.”; and TI, “Skirmishes,” p. 23: “Plato … says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a ‘Christian,’ …”

12 BGE, pp. 55, 199–200, 209, 229, 262; WP, Pref., pp. 10, 22, 23, 41, 56, 112, 751, 1017, 1026; cf. Richard Schact, “Nietzsche and Nihilism,” in Solomon, Nietzsche, pp. 60–65; Löwith, Karl, From Hegel to Nietzsche (Garden City, 1967), pp. 188–189, 258Google Scholar.

13 Zarathustra's notion of the “last man” is misunderstood if it is taken as a critique of the “petty bourgeois” (Solomon, Nietzsche, “Introduction,” p. 5): Zarathustra is describing not a type that exists in the present but one that may predominate in the future, in a society where “work is a form of entertainment … one no longer becomes poor or rich … everybody is the same …” — i.e., the classless society.